Dear Tom, Is that you who initially posted problem with Athlon, MSI and NVidia GeForce4? If yes, please read carefully. 1) The choice of Athlon and nForce2 chipset was wrong from the beginning. nForce2 chipset is not widely used by Linux users (in fact, it is quite rare chipset), and therefore, its kernel support may not be adequate (or it lags far behind compared with Intel chipset support). 2) Probably you have to manually load proprietary nVidia drivers with insmod, and the configure network. I am not sure about the sound. 3) I am also have unhappy experience with AthlonXP and VIA chipset. ALL problems and artifacts have gone after I have replaced m/b with AMD 761 chipset. 4) If you want less headache, just use Intel P4 and Intel chipsets. ********************************************* * Best Regards --- Andrei Verovski * * Personal Home Page * http://snow.prohosting.com/guru4mac * Mac, Linux, DTP, Development, IT WEB Site ********************************************* On Friday, Feb 21, 2003, at 02:02 Europe/Helsinki, Tom Nicholson wrote:
Sorry I can't contribute much except the details of my experience here. I believe there may be a serious problem with SuSE and nVidia nForce2 chipset. To date, I've gotten nothing responsive from Asus nor nVidia nor SuSE.
Bought the Asus A7N8X motherboard (nVidia nForce2 chipset) to build a friend a system with Athlon 1800 and 1 gig ram. The GeForce4 video card is AGP card. Partitioned his 160 gigs hd as 120 for xp because that's what he wanted and 40 for SuSE because I wanted him to experience Linux.
Set it to boot Linux from floppy no problem. Booted into KDE3 fine. The big problems were no network and no audio. Even after installing the rpm from the cd that came with the m/b, still no go. Tried downloading and installing nVidia's rpm's and they refused to install. Said they would corrupt the kernel. And Asus webpage says they aren't relevant to Asus m/b anyhow.
Email to Asus took 5 days for a response and all I got was a voice support number and a fax number. The fax number fails and fax machine reports an error. The voice number was answered by a man who assigned a case number, said there were 9 customer svc reps and for me to wait 2 hours. So I'm still waiting 2 days later. Today he said they were just too busy to get back to me.
One big problem is that nVidia won't release the source code to build a GPL driver for the nvidia network device. On the A7N8X deluxe there are 2 network cards build into motherboard. The other's a 3com 3c92x.
People using RedHat and Mandrake have reported that they managed to install drivers for the 3com ethernet. Some have gotten audio working too and seem happy with the motherboard.
As far as I call tell, nforce2's a big waste of time for SuSE users and seriously question whether it's worth the effort to go Mandrake or RH. The steps involved for RH essentially come down to creating a new kernel and driver set. Several people have detailed the steps needed on their websites. SuSE seems to build the correct (AMD) kernel. Tom